A quick guide to the mating habits of demonic birds and the such
by Dantriestobeproductive
Summary: Neuro starts acting weird. Yako is understandably freaked out.
1. The courting of demon birds

This is unbetaed, so yeah, sorry for whatever sounds weird or words-that-don't-belong-there. The beta thing...is a thing in progress, I swear, I just need to...kick my bout of human interaction-related anxiety in the face and act.

(...Yeah, I'll may publish some more unbetaed fics before that happens...)

Anyways, enjoy!

* * *

Neuro starts acting weird on a Friday. Well, Neuro _always_ acts weird, at least by human standards (as he says his behavior isn't different from any high-class demon, which is worrying enough), but Yako is used to that kind of weird, the sadistic I-like-to-torture-you-and-verbally-abuse-you weird. _This_ weird, she isn't, and it's potentially scarier for this same reason.  
First, Neuro tones down the abuse. Which is good for Yako, of course, except it isn't, because it means there's going to be an _increase_ of torture and/or life or death situations in the future. It's like a cooling off period, and Yako has grown to be wary of them. She _is_ pretty sure Neuro wouldn't, in the end, let any kind of serious harm come her way, but she much prefers to see the knife coming before having it stick into the wall next to her head, and she isn't being completely metaphorical here.  
The second _weird_ thing that starts to happen is that Neuro starts to dump over her the puzzles he's finished with. Which, okay, a little strange but maybe a new kind of demeaning act? Making her clean up his mess? Except then he _forces_ her to start solving the puzzles, and after the first day she knows it's best to just do it and not ask if she doesn't want to see Neuro's 'innocent' "No?" face. If it means less torture, so be it. Also, it's kind of fun, even if some are ridiculously hard and _bite_ her (which basically means Neuro tampered with them to make them more difficult, joy).  
But then, one day after a long, stomach filling case, Neuro brings her a knife.

A _bloodied _knife_. _

In the_ middle of the night. _

Yako dies a little inside, but she's been for _way too many_ _years_ with the creep (and without him, during his three years long absence, the traitorous part of her brain whispers) to jump and scream for her life like the character of a horror movie, and she knows him too well to feel seriously terrified, even if he's wearing one of his blank stares plus creepy smile while hanging from the ceiling.  
She's a little worried, though. Worried about the origin of the knife, and why on Earth's sake would Neuro bring it to her (she isn't even going to think about the unholy hours. It wouldn't be the first time the demon woke her up in the middle of the night in an ecstatic and drooling frenzy related to a new and juicy case).  
Then, she realizes the knife is familiar, and _why_ it's familiar, and her wariness turns into disbelief as she stares at the principal weapon used in the serial killings they just cracked open.  
She asks just _what_ in hell's name is he doing with the principal proof needed to put the killer in prison for a _long_ time, and his answer makes so little sense she just. It's too early for Neuro's recent brand of weirder.

_What, do you not like it, wood louse? It's for you._

She turns away, buries herself back into her blankets and tells him to bring that back to where it belongs, in a _police office_, for fucks sake, and try not to steal any more crime weapons, because it just _isn't good for their advertising._

She isn't sure when he goes away, but the next morning she wakes up to a _rat with ten eyes and three mouths_ biting at her ankles. She can't stop moving for the rest of the day, lest she'll feel her legs start burning and blistering.

Neuro sulks.  
He still starts to bring her things from crime scenes, though he doesn't try bringing something directly related and needed on the trials again. Yako gets tired of explaining to Neuro that _thievery is a crime on itself, no matter how demonic his ass is_, and just ends up going along with Neuro's new brand of insane.  
She just hopes he won't start putting people in boxes.  
The third, and even _weirder_ thing he starts to do (though for this one he waits two weeks after the 'dumping puzzles and objects from crime scenes' thing) is that he starts to do her hair. It could be passed off as his new weird way of annoying her, what with how much he _pulls_ her strands, uses _ungodly stuff_ to make it stiff as a rock or jelly-like and even makes it _change colors at random_, but he always seems weirdly proud when he's finished, with an expression that practically screams "See?", and Yako doesn't know what she's supposed to see, just that her hair suddenly grew snakes on its tips and she has to wrestle them into a ponytail to stop them from biting her face.  
He takes to do her hair thrice a week, and she can't, for her life, escape him.  
(She ends up eating part of her hair once too, when Neuro turns it into something that _looks, feels and smells_ like spaghetti. She gets a stomach ache rivaling her mother's cooking, but the taste is _so worth it_. Even if she spots a little of a bald spot on her head for a while afterwards.)  
All that weird seems to get to her eventually, as she doesn't just resigns herself to get used to it, but starts to imitate him, _encourage it._ Well, she doesn't _dump_ puzzles over his head, as fun as his reaction would be for the 0,1 second before her demise, but she starts buying him puzzles and leaving them in his desk, and though she isn't going to fucking _steal something from a crime scene_, she...starts to take photos, which doesn't help much with her reputation, but. She likes Neuro's expression when he sees the photos on his desk.  
And one day, she gets the guts to brush his hair.  
It isn't that busy of a day, her 'demonic makeover' had been done the day before, and she's still sporting her hair in two horn-like buns she hadn't been able to undo even after an hour under the shower. The opportunity just appears, when Neuro is dozing off on the sofa, and she's taking advantage of the lull in case-hunting to try to brush her hair back to normal. It's a losing battle.  
She finally gives up, wondering how in god's sake did Neuro manage to make such bulky horns when her hair is so _short_, but as the same as with the spaghetti hair (which had gone to her hips), she stops before what little of her remaining sanity is threatened (or before the hair somehow absorbs her negative thoughts and tries to kill her. It had happened with the Hell-Cat shaped hair).  
It's then when she looks at Neuro, sprawled and relaxed, and a lightbulb goes on in her head (her hair, coincidentally, turns a shade lighter). Not dwelling on how much of a stupid idea it is, she moves until she's in front of Neuro's head, crouches down and brings the brush to the demon's head until the bristles touch his hair-  
And Neuro jumps to the window. _Literally._  
Yako would be laughing, if she wasn't completely frozen by the demon's expression.  
Surprised, pleasantly surprised? And...was that a _blush_?  
She just stays there, brush in hand and eyebrows almost touching her hairline, until Neuro seems to get his wits back and sends her one of his deep, analytical stares.

He doesn't ask what she's doing, and she doesn't answer with a "brushing your hair". Still, their eyes seem to be having the conversation just fine, and he gets back to the floor, passes Troy and goes to stand in front of the other side of the sofa, facing her. She puts up the brush, and asks with the same calmness that five years of insanity and mysteries and disentangling human psychology have taught her. "Do you want me to brush your hair or not?" and, like that, the air seems to shift, and again when Neuro softly snorts and goes to sit down, looking at her with an unsaid "Well?", hiding more human emotions beneath than Yako could have even dreamt of. And Neuro _has_ been turning human, has been learning since she was sixteen and he'd eaten his first meal in the human world, but the stark realization at seeing it bare in front of her still makes her heart skip a beat.  
She gets up from her crouched position, and walks until she's in front of Neuro's head, behind the sofa. She starts to brush his hair.


	2. Epilogue

NSWF-ish? Idk either.

Just, uh...there you go.

* * *

_Honestly, she should've thought about it slow and carefully before jumping in the demon's mouth._

* * *

She's both unsurprised and awed at how soft Neuro's hair is. She can run her fingers through it easily, scratch the smooth scalp with only making part of her fingers disappear, and the brush passes just as smoothly. Neuro's hair seems to shiver at the touch, and it only makes her want to run her fingers through it all the more. The soft strands aren't as thick as she thought, and make a faint smell of ozone drift into the air with every touch. It makes her slightly dizzy, but she's grown accustomed to gases that would probably kill any other human in minutes thanks to all the years of being second-hand exposed to miasma. And the smell is... actually nice, somehow, something that makes her think of planes and Neuro's return. Nice thoughts, pleasant ones, that make her own hair unknowingly mirror Neuro's in color. She closes her eyes, biting down a sigh of contentment.

Her nails scratch the scalp again, making the strands of hair curl around her wrist, and she takes it away, wanting to pull back the dark strands that fall over his face so she can brush them too, but her hand knocks against something hard and rough to the touch. She opens her eyes in surprise.

In front of her, a pair of horns rest over the back of a humanoid head, and the view of Neuro's...facial structure? _Bone_ structure? from behind is actually quite interesting, if weird. Like the freakish red claw-like hands that Yako _knows_ aren't the ones he naturally reverts to in human form weird (she's seen his human hands. Freakish nails? Yes. Red and pointy and dangerous looking? No).

Neuro, on his part, either isn't aware or doesn't care, so Yako keeps brushing the back of his hair, trying to avoid the horns. But they are there, and she ends up accidentally brushing them, despite her best efforts.

The effect is _instantaneous_.

Neuro tenses, a shiver traveling his whole body, and a croaking noise that sounds too much like a bird's comes out of his beak. Yako doesn't know what possesses her to do it again, but the sounds he makes are encouraging enough, so she doesn't stop, and instead goes to brush his hair with a hand while she strokes the horns with the other, alternating between one and the other. Neuro's choked bird noises keep getting louder, and her own cheeks flush as her heartbeat speeds up and Neuro's hair tangles in her hands and wrists and seems to hold on for dear life.

With a last cry, Neuro tenses and then his whole frame slumps, hair resting lax around Yako's hands. She disentangles the limp strands from her fingers, brushes them until they're neatly placed (and a small shiver of bliss goes through them every time the bristles touch the strands) and avoids the horns, her mind slowly catching up on _what the fuck just happened._

There's not much time to do so though, because the moment she puts away the brush a hand grasps her wrist and throws her forward. She falls on the sofa, _on Neuro_, and she's frantically trying to think of ways of escaping the demon's wrath (and ticking out things where to hide behind when he starts to throw pointy objects) when something wet and squishy hits her head, not hard enough to actually hurt, and moves up on a straight line, to disappear and hit her head again. Yako realizes with growing horror that Neuro is _licking her head_, but the pain of corrosive saliva eating through her flesh and skull never comes. Instead, Neuro keeps doing that, his beak pulling on her hair every once in a while, and Yako realizes that he's _actually undoing the unholy buns and straightening her hair_. His arms, which she wasn't even aware had surrounded her frame, hold her still and unable to escape. Neuro chirps happily.

And that's the moment she remembers the trip to the zoo in seventh grade, and the cage full of birds they'd fawned over. She remembers the monitor's voice explaining to her that _no, those parrots weren't trying to pluck the other's feathers off and eat each_ _other_ and then explaining to her classmates that _no, they weren't kissing each other, either, not exactly. It's better than that._

And suddenly _everything_ that's been happening those last weeks makes sense, in that stupid, painful way that comes with "things that seem obvious in hindsight".

This realization is quickly eclipsed by the one that _she's been dating Neuro for_ _**weeks**_.

Her mother will probably be monstrously upset that she didn't tell her before. And that will mean inviting said boyfriend to a _family dinner._

She internally groans, as Neuro preens her hair and holds her.

(Later, she'll realize he's shaped her hair to look like a dead cockroach. People avoid her on the streets all the way back home.)

* * *

EDIT: Now with a sequel! :D


End file.
